Toxic Site Identification Program in Azerbaijan

Abstract

The need to protect communities from hazardous waste is an important agenda for any nation. Although pollutant management and policy development are attempted in many developing countries, it is not always successful due to limited funds, project resources, and access to trained experts to conduct toxic site identification projects. For this reason, Pure Earth created the Toxic Site Identification Program (TSIP). The goal of the TSIP program is to provide reliable information and data that identifies location of toxic sites and the level of toxic severity. TSIP is significant because it provides developing countries a database of ranked toxic sites identified as hazardous risk to human health. For example, Azerbaijan is one of the most polluted post-Soviet nations, but has limited resources to address and manage its polluted sites. The Azerbaijani TSIP database is the first reliable data source that identifies hazardous pollutants in the country. Our study is significant because it discusses how the TSIP labels and ranks the level of toxic severity to human health. It is also the first data source in Azerbaijan that identifies which Soviet legacy toxic sites are affecting local communities. Although our study is specific to Azerbaijan, the TSIP method can be applied to nations with similar data limitations and the need for a database that identifies country specific environmental and hazardous locations. The data sampling method and results are mapped and accompanied by tables of the collected pollutant types to identify communities at greatest health-risk to legacy toxic sites.

Nature-based management scenarios for the Khojasan Lake

“…Specifically, the limitations of resources and funding to invest in urban remediation cleanup projects, for surface water, are often unsuccessful and do not fully restore the water quality, resulting in a failed rehabilitation project (Kagalou et al 2008;Le et al 2010;Søndergaard et al 2007). In this sense, the difficulties and problems that arise during the cleaning of Lake Boyukshor in Azerbaijan can be cited as an example (Abbasov et al 2019). Thus, to effectively tackle challenges of surface water pollution within LMICs, it is important to establish an economical method that is sustainable.…”

“…The diversity of pollutants, within urban water sources, can significantly vary based on location and pollutant type (Goher et al 2019), this is especially true for nations with active oil production (see Santana et al 2014;da Costa Cunha et al 2019;Okoro et al 2020;Takshe et al 2010;Winch and Stepnitz 2011), or countries that have a combination of both location and pollution type (see Fayiga et al 2018), or even LMICs that have a history of unsuccessful environmental remediation projects aimed at reducing pollution of urban surface water, such as in Azerbaijan (Abbasov et al 2019;Scandizzo and Abbasov 2021). For example, in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, located on the Absheron peninsula touching the Caspian Sea, there are high pollution levels due to permanent industrial and municipality wastewater releases during the Soviet industrial expansion (Khalilova and Mammadov 2016).…”

“…Specifically, our study site, Khojasan Lake, is one of the most polluted urban lakes in Azerbaijan from previous and current industrial and untreated municipal wastewater discharges (Abbasov 2018;WB 2017). This persistent pollution and mismanagement have turned our study site into an industrial and domestic waste reservoir, which poses a serious public health hazard to nearby residents and ecosystems in Baku (i.e., the recent extinction of several fish species in Khojasan Lake) (Abbasov et al 2019).…”